Asteroid 2012 DA14 makes its record-breaking brush with Earth Friday: Watch it live

Asteroid 2012 DA14 live video:Watch its record-breaking brush with Earth

Asteroid 2012 DA14 live: Video

NASA’s near real-time imagery of the asteroid’s flyby before and after its closest approach

Asteroid 2012 DA14 is 45-metres across, weighs about 130,000-tons and is flying through Earth’s backyard at 28,000 km/h Friday — the closest flyby for a rock of its size since we started tracking them. It’s nearer to Earth than many communication and weather satellites.

And you can watch it as it passes. NASA is broadcasting near real-time images of the asteroid with the help of astronomers in Australia and Europe. The asteroid reached its closest point at about 2:25 p.m. Friday. Images will keep rolling in throughout the day from observatories in Australia, Europe and North America through the evening.

NASA will cap off its coverage Friday night, broadcasting images from its Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., from 9 p.m. ET to midnight.

At roughly 9:20 in the morning, local time, on Friday, a massive explosion caused serious damage across a significant (and as yet undefined) area of Russia. Across a wide geographic area, people rushed from their homes or offices after a bright flash of light and massive roaring sound were heard. A shock wave blew out windows and caused structural damage, at times significant, to buildings. An estimated 500 people were injured, dozens seriously enough to require hospitalization.

This is certainly an alarming story. But (relatively) recent history, in Russia, to boot, tells us that the Russians, in fact, got off easy

“NASA places a high priority on tracking asteroids and protecting our home planet from them,” the space agency said earlier this week. “This flyby will provide a unique opportunity for researchers to study a near-Earth object up close.”

Despite its close proximity, scientists are confident it poses no risk to Earth or even the satellites orbiting the Earth.

As asteroids go, DA14 is a shrimp. The one that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago was 9.6 km across. But this rock could still do immense damage if it struck, releasing the energy equivalent of 2.4 million tons of TNT and wiping out 2,000 square kilometres.

As for the back-to-back events, “this is indeed very rare and it is historic,” said Jim Green, NASA’s director of planetary science.

“These fireballs happen about once a day or so, but we just don’t see them because many of them fall over the ocean or in remote areas. This one was an exception,” he said on NASA TV.

As hundreds of thousands tuned into NASA’s livestream Friday, the space agency noted on its website that the path of the meteor appeared to be quite different than that of the asteroid, making the two objects “completely unrelated.” The meteor seemed to be travelling from north to south, while the asteroid was due to pass from south to north — in the opposite direction.

Even after Friday’s scare, scientists remained certain that Asteroid DA14 would not impact Earth. And chances were extremely remote, they said, that it will run into any of the satellites orbiting 36,000 km up.

Most of the solar system’s asteroids are situated in a belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, and remain stable there for billions of years. Some occasionally pop out, though, into Earth’s neighbourhood.

The flyby provides a rare learning opportunity for scientists eager to keep future asteroids at bay — and a prime-time advertisement for those anxious to step up preventive measures.

Friday’s meteor impact — just 16 hours in advance of DA14’s point of closest encounter — further strengthened the asteroid-alert message.

“We are in a shooting gallery and this is graphic evidence of it,” said former Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart, chairman emeritus of the B612 Foundation, committed to protecting Earth from dangerous asteroids.

Schweickart noted that 500,000 to 1 million sizable near-Earth objects — asteroids or comets — are out there. Yet less than 1% — fewer than 10,000 — have been inventoried.

Humanity has to do better, he said. The foundation is working to build and launch an infrared space telescope to find and track threatening asteroids.

DA14 — discovered by Spanish astronomers last February — is “such a close call” that it is a “celestial torpedo across the bow of spaceship Earth,” Schweickart said in a phone interview Thursday.

Astronomers organized asteroid-encounter parties for Friday and experts just about everywhere were giving flyby rundowns.

NASA’s deep-space antenna in California’s Mojave Desert was ready to collect radar images, but not until eight hours after the closest approach given the United States’ poor positioning for the big event.

Scientists at NASA’s Near-Earth Object program at California’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory estimate that an object of this size makes a close approach like this every 40 years. The likelihood of a strike is every 1,200 years.

If a killer asteroid was, indeed, incoming, a spacecraft could, in theory, be launched to nudge the asteroid out of Earth’s way, changing its speed and the point of intersection. A second spacecraft would make a slight alteration in the path of the asteroid and ensure it never intersects with the planet again, Schweickart said.

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